Timing is Everything
by shooting-stetsons
Summary: Harry Potter and Hermione Granger fall through a crack in the fabric of the universe, and wind up in a most unusual place...Takes place during Deathly Hallows
1. prologue

_Hey little train! We're jumping on_

_The train that goes to the kingdom_

_We're happy Ma, we're having fun_

_And the train ain't even left the station_

Harry gave Hermione one last twirl before dropping her, laughing, into a dip, and pulling her upright again. For a few moments she was beaming, looking right into his eyes with all troubles momentarily forgotten, and the oddest sensation came over Harry. It felt as though there was something enormous and anxious in his gut, wanting very much to get out.

All he could think about as he looked back at her was of the look of mournful determination on her face when Ron asked if she would leave, abandon Harry to his fate while they returned to Hogwarts. She had never considered, for even one moment, leaving Harry on his own. She gave Ron up for him, in a way. In some strange other universe, she had broken things off with Ron to do the one thing the redhead most feared.

And was he worth staying for? Hermione was not the sort of girl to come a dime a dozen. She was smart, and brave, and pretty, and funny when she wanted to be and rebellious when the time was appropriate. He was skinny, and short, and sort of thick when it came to feelings. But she had _stayed_, regardless of all of that. That had to count for something.

_So why are you still thinking about it?_ a voice sounding an awful lot _like_ Hermione's, the voice of reason and logic and everything that made sense in the world, whispered in his ear.

Just as Harry was strongly considering leaning in to most likely destroy the one friendship he had left, Hermione pulled away. She wouldn't meet his eyes as she went back to where she had been sitting before, listening to the Wireless for news. Perhaps it was better that way, not to take quite so many risks.

_O Children_

_Lift up your voice_

_Lift up your voice_

_O Children_

_Rejoice_

_Rejoice_

As the ancient house rattled and shook, tumbling apart all around them, Hermione seized a handful of Harry's robes and dragged him with all her strength toward the wall.

The enormous snake that took up half the room reared back and struck with such speed she had only enough time to jerk and hope the monster had missed her; she was running so much on adrenaline that she couldn't feel a damn thing. Harry had collapsed against the wall, gasping for air and clutching his head, oblivious to her peril. They had maybe seconds before Voldemort was in the room, judging by the amount of pain Harry was in.

"_R-reducto!_" she cried, jamming her wand into Nagini's mouth. The snake flew back, right into the dark-robed figure that had materialized at the door of the very small room.

Terror became her. In the split second it took for Voldemort to help his familiar she had hauled Harry upright and through the window, weakened by an enormous crack down the middle, Apparating mid-air to _somewhere safe…please just somewhere safe…_

Her feet hit solid ground, legs buckling beneath her onto what felt like tile or glass. The light she could make out was dim, metallic, dancing in her eyes, a strange whirring, buzzing, grinding, whooshing sound filling her ears and head until she collapsed on the cool floor.

She could feel the pool of blood forming beneath her now; the snake had gotten a good bite into her and she hadn't even felt it. The hand wound around Harry's coat tightened, clutching him ever closer as a pair of well-worn black shoes stepped purposefully into her field of vision.

"Now," a young man's voice began thoughtfully, mostly to himself as he lowered to a crouch to look into Hermione's face. She could see that he was young and pale and wearing a bow-tie, but her vision was fading fast, "_how_ did you get on my TARDIS?"

His voice echoed in her head until the words made no sense at all, and she was lost to oblivion.


	2. Chapter 1

Harry returned to his senses, head pounding and eyes fuzzy without glasses, in a bright white room and on a hospital cot. His grubby clothes had been replaced with a pair of clean pajama pants and bandages on his bare torso where he'd been injured with even the most minor cuts and scrapes. It took a few moments to remember exactly _how_ he had been hurt, but when the events of the night before returned to him he sat up to get his bearings, blinking black spots from his eyes. As he groped around in search of his glasses, a pair of soft hands placed them on his nose. He turned around.

A woman of perhaps her early twenties, very pretty with pale freckled skin and ginger hair to rival Ginny Weasley's, took a step back and eyed him warily.

"Who're you?" asked Harry a bit hotly out of his dislike for being stared at. "Where am I?"

The woman crossed her arms, expression suddenly huffy and one eyebrow quirked suspiciously. "I'm Amy, who're you? And you bloody well ought to know where you are, as _you_ broke in," she retorted in a sharp Scottish accent that made him think almost longingly of Professor McGonagall. First his old girlfriend, now his Transfiguration professor? Harry had an inkling he was dreaming all of this.

"I'm Harry," he begrudgingly allowed, shifting awkwardly on the cot.

"Harry who?"

"_Amy_ who?"

She pursed her lips. "Amy Pond. Nosy."

"That's nice," said Harry without thinking first, still a little dazed from being unconscious. "Rather like a fairy tale. I'm…you _really_ don't know who I am?"

"How could I? I've just met you," argued Amy irritably, picking at her fingernails. So she was a Muggle.

Feeling a measure of relief, he shook his head at his own paranoia. "Sorry. I'm Harry Potter."

Amy's eyebrows shot up. "Oh, _that's nice_," she mimicked him in a sarcastic voice, "but a bit too boy wizard, eh?"

Harry blinked cautiously, looking over Amy from her ginger hair to her blue trainers before deciding that she was just very stand-offish, and the wizard connection was just a coincidence. As wary of him as she seemed, she didn't have a wand trained on him. He shrugged at her. "It's just my name."

"Sure," she replied with a roll of her eyes. "Just sit quietly, okay? The Doctor'll be in to fix your _head_ in a few moments."

A doctor? Was he in some sort of hospital? Why wasn't the nurse in a uniform? This couldn't be St. Mungo's, of course, but then where was he? The walls, ceiling, and floor were almost painfully white, and everything had a sleek, rounded look to it. How had Hermione found this place?

The thought and absence of Hermione made his heart begin to race as he looked around again. "Where's my friend?" he asked, remembering now how Hermione had been fighting for the both of them as Voldemort had come ever closer. "Where's Hermione?"

Amy twitched her eyebrows as though she wanted dearly to roll her eyes, probably assuming they were using code names. "She's with the Doctor, was bleeding something horrible as far as I saw."

"_What?_"

As if on cue, a muffled cry of pain reached Harry from beyond the door Amy was now blocking. Jumping to his feet, he was nearly blinded by a stretching, burning pain in his chest, and for the first time since he'd woken up Amy looked legitimately concerned.

"Slow down, Potter," she said firmly, pulling him back onto the cot while he wiped at his streaming eyes. "You had a splinter the size of a Dalek in your chest!"

"A what? Never mind," muttered Harry, getting more gingerly to his feet and restricting his movement. "Can I see my friend, please?"

Amy considered his plea for several minutes before opening the white door and leading the way through a veritable labyrinth of corridors, to another room with less intense light and color.

The first name for the room that came to Harry's mind was _kitchen_, but it was by far the oddest kitchen he had ever seen, faintly whirring and cluttered with machinery. However his attention was drawn away from the scenery when he spotted the blood on the floor, and realized that one of the many things cluttering the table was Hermione, slumped over and gasping for air.

"Hermione," he murmured, rushing to her side as quickly as allowed when slouched over to keep his wound from stretching. Her dark unfocused eyes flickered to his face before sliding closed. He looked around at Amy, who was absorbed in the function of an electric mixer. "Why didn't you look after her first?" he demanded angrily.

"She's _being_ looked after," shot Amy over her shoulder.

Almost immediately after she said it, a lanky, raggedy sort of man in an Oxford shirt and bow tie came barreling out from _inside_ one of the cupboards as if it were a cellar with a handful of salty potato crisps. The man who Harry concluded must be the doctor took one look at Hermione's face, slammed his free (but no less salty) hand on the table and cheerfully bellowed, "_WAKE UP!_"

Hermione's blue eyelids fluttered open and the doctor guided one of the crisps between her bloodless lips. "Suck. Amy, custard!" Amy did a half-turn from her place to Hermione's right, brushing Harry aside, and spooned a bit of what she'd been mixing into Hermione's mouth with all the precision of a twelve-year-old part-time babysitter.

"What are you doing?" asked Harry, looking incredulously between Amy, the doctor, and the bloody holes pierced in Hermione's jacket. "You've got to stop her bleeding, not raise her blood-sugar!"

"This _is_ to stop the bleeding!" shouted the doctor, having just vanished into what appeared to be a wind-tunnel in the back of the crowded room (that Harry was beginning to relate to Mr. Weasley's messy shed of Muggle electronics). "The venom controls the blood-flow from the wound, and this is hopefully going to neutralize it. Here now Hermione, take a sip of this."

The raggedy doctor poured a measure of Tabasco sauce into Hermione's mouth. She choked, but Harry could see a visible slowing of blood-flow from her side. He closed his hand around hers, relief flooding him, thinking it was over.

However not quite finished yet, the doctor stuck his hand inside of the jar and returned it full of white powder, holding it in front of Hermione's face. "Lick."

Her eyes slowly focusing, Hermione made an indignant noise. "Your hands," she weakly said somewhere between a moan and whimper, "they're dirty." Harry fought a strained laugh. Typical Hermione to worry about hygiene at a time like this.

The doctor bent low until they were face-to-face. "And unless you lick, Hermione, you _life_ will be _over._ Now, _lick._"

Tentatively, she stuck out her tongue, caught a bit of the powder on the tip, and shuddered. "Chalk dust?"

"Indeed," replied the doctor matter-of-factly, ducking under the table and coming up with a white paper bag. "Jelly Baby?"

Wrinkling her brow, Hermione looked down at the bloody hole in her jacket. "Hasn't it stopped bleeding yet? It…it feels like it's stopped."

The doctor blinked. "Of course it has, why would you need Jelly Babies for that? I was just offering," he replied before popping one into his mouth and grinning to himself self-satisfactorily. "Loved the things for two hundred years; good thing I regenerate or I'd be as big as the TARDIS. Anyway," he continued, tossing the bag carelessly over his shoulder into the depths of the room and pulling a gauze pad from another drawer. "Now, there is still some venom in your bloodstream, but your system will eventually pump it out; the process could take anywhere between a few hours and a few days, so we'll have to just patch you up and see what happens. Shirt up, please."

"_What?_"

Harry supposed it was a positive sign of her improving condition, for the color to rise, albeit weak in pigment, to Hermione's cheeks so rapidly. He could have laughed if the situation weren't so serious, but decided to step in instead. "Let me do it, I know her better." Taking the bandage in hand he felt perfect confidence, but when he saw how wide Hermione's eyes had become he had a surreal lapse back to the night they danced in the tent, the feel of her body hugged close to his. When he looked up and saw Amy fighting a laugh he finally blushed, quite aware that he was not wearing a shirt.

"Er," said Amy, "come along, Doctor, we'll go check the solar-shields."

"The shields? Amy, the shields are flawless, they – _oh_. _Oh_, they want to be _alone!_ No, unacceptable, improper." Despite his apparent disapproval, the doctor was grinning wickedly at Harry and Hermione.

Rolling her eyes, the redhead seized the doctor's arm and hauled him to the door. "Honestly, _old man_, don't be such a badger…"

The door slammed shut behind them, and Harry and Hermione looked at one another before laughing weakly at their own folly. "I'll show you mine if you show me yours," he said lightly to break the tension, peeling away part of his bandage to show her the shallow gash the splinter of wood had made in his skin.

Hermione wrinkled her nose in a cringe, but when she tried to lift herself off the table, all the color that had returned to her face minutes ago drained away again. Her eyes became glassy, and Harry had to wrap an arm around her shoulders to get her upright.

"I…I don't think I can move my arm," she said with some difficulty, the fingers of her left hand just barely twitching. "I'm sorry."

"It's fine," he assured her quickly, carefully putting her left arm on top of his head as he knelt beside her, so she was balanced and he had a clear view. "I'm going to…" He cleared his throat, face and neck burning. "I'm going to lift your shirt up now."

"Okay. Go ahead."

Harry thought this would be easy, Hermione being his best friend for six years and all, but lifting the hem of her shirt the few inches it took to expose the dark red holes, oozing small amounts of blood, in her side seemed to take an age. Her skin was cold to the touch (and he was trying very hard _not_ to touch her) and white where it was not stained rust-red. He reached for his wand to clean her up a bit before realizing that it was gone. "Have you got your wand on you?"

Hermione shifted slightly. "I…it's in my boot. I stuck it in there after we landed, in case of Snatchers or Muggles."

Nodding to himself, Harry reached into Hermione's boot and pulled out her wand, casting a quick Scourgifying Charm to clean up the congealed blood before carefully placing the bandage on. "So…how _did_ we get here, anyway?" he asked.

She sighed. "I don't know, Harry. I was trying to figure it out too. Last thing I remember, I was pushing through a crack in the window at Bagshot's house. Then I Disapparated, but I must not have been focusing properly, I was terrified. All I could think was to get us somewhere safe. We landed here, and that's all I remember until that doctor was screaming at me to wake up, after you came in." She cleared her throat carefully, trying to be rid of the weary crack in her voice. She'd had to take long pauses between each sentence to gather her strength for the next. "Um, Harry?"

"Yes?"

"I think the bandage is on pretty well now."

Harry looked down and saw that his hands were still resting on her waist, and jerked them away. "Oh. Sorry." He stood up and looked around the cluttered room, trying to press his bandage back onto his chest, but the adhesive was spoiled. "So…_where_ are we?"

"I don't really know," replied Hermione with a shake of her head. "I think I heard the doctor say something about it being a ship of sorts. Doesn't seem like one, does it? Seems more like an underground building, but…not underground…"

He couldn't help but guffaw a bit at that. "I think you need to rest a while, Hermione. Your head's not in the game." She nodded groggily, and Harry grinned. "I'll go find that doctor bloke, okay? Maybe he'll have something for you." She was barely able to voice her assent by the time he had left for the corridor.


	3. Chapter 2

Only one corner away from the crack-science kitchen, Harry realized he was utterly lost and that the strange ship or building they were in was much larger than he had originally anticipated. When Amy had been guiding him he was so consumed with worry for Hermione that he had not been able to pay attention to where he was going. At one point, after climbing up a flight of stairs, he came upon an indoor swimming pool in the middle of a library, and swore he was going mad or had been slipped the mickey before stumbling upon what looked like a massive control deck in some low-budget science-fiction film.

There were buttons and knobs and levers and screens of all shapes and sizes, tubes and wires, and in the middle of it all an enormous glass…something. After years of experience with Dumbledore's many gadgets in his office, Harry figured it would be best not to touch anything, but couldn't resist making a poke at one of the many screens along the center console.

The doctor's face flickered into life on the screen the moment Harry touched it, one eyebrow quirked and looking hilariously stern. "Now, why are you mucking about in my things?"

Harry jumped back, startled. "Sorry," he muttered absurdly before remembering he was talking to a screen.

The doctor on the screen laughed. "You just apologized to a video, didn't you? You _did!_ Aha, this is so weird! Okay, well, you touching this has sent off a signal to my sonic screwdriver, so by the time you turn around I'll probably be right there waiting for you to explain yourself. Good luck, cheerio!"

There was a tap on Harry's shoulder, and he turned to see the doctor himself waiting with arms crossed and a self-satisfied smile. "Harry," he greeted cheerfully, "you're snooping!"

Again, Harry jumped back. "Sorry," he repeated. "I was just looking for you, Doctor…sorry, Doctor who?"

The raggedy young doctor grinned and seemed to bounce once on the balls of his feet before replying, "It's just the Doctor, Harry, and may I say, it is an honor and a privilege to see you without a shirt on."

"Without a…? Oh! Merlin…" Harry impulsively crossed his arms to cover up his bare chest, and there was a bubble of laughter somewhere off to his right as Amy appeared, chucking a t-shirt his way with a smirk. "Thanks. Um, Doctor then, is it? Where are we, exactly?"

"Well, Harry, that depends," answered the Doctor. "Are you asking where we are _standing_ or where the thing we're standing in is?"

"Um…both, I suppose?"

The Doctor seemed even more greatly amused by Harry's trepidation than any of his previous hi-jinks. "You're on my TARDIS," he explained as cool as anything, "and my TARDIS is currently orbiting a collapsing supernova."

"A _what_?" asked Harry, certain that he had not heard the Doctor correctly, which only made the slightly-older man's smirk widen. "A supernova? A _real_ supernova?"

"Not a _real_ supernova, Harry, a _collapsing_ one. Though I suppose that still makes it a _real_ one..." replied the Doctor as though he were distracted by his own unceasing thoughts.

Despite being unsatisfied with the answer the Doctor gave him, Harry figured it would be best for him to go on with the conversation rather than argue about whether or not they were really orbiting a collapsing supernova. "Er, alright then. Well, Hermione's not exactly in top condition, and I was wondering if maybe you could do something…?" he asked while buttoning the shirt Amy gave him.

The Doctor, having had just turned toward the steering console, swung back around with a most patronizing quirk of his eyebrows. "Rest. The girl needs rest," he sternly said as though Harry had just suggested they all take turns doing cartwheels around the TARDIS. "A good night's sleep should have her to rights in no time. Amy, put her to bed? In the blue room, please."

"_Which_ blue room? They're _all blue_…" grumbled the red-headed woman as she stalked back to the kitchen.

Watching her go with a wry and yet almost saddened look on his face, the Doctor shook his head as Harry looked inquiringly at him. "I promised her we'd go to Space Florida, and we ended up in Space Majorca. Still don't think she quite forgave me for that one, but I said 'Hey, you're the one who bit four psychiatrists!' Girls and their imaginary friends, I ask you…" He continued to fondly gripe on about his friend (or girlfriend?) under his breath as he turned back to the steering mechanism and absently pulled a few levers.

Now that Hermione was being taken care of, clothes were on his back and he was no longer quite as worried about being in a Death Eater base (at least not as worried as he was about being in the home of a mad physician), Harry turned away from the steering console and peered out the windows in the TARDIS' front door. "How do you know who I am, anyway?" he asked, not entirely sure he believed he was in a spaceship until he saw the stars for himself and his breath was taken away. "Doctor?"

"Everyone knows who you are," said the Doctor absently while staring into a screen. "You're Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived, the Chosen One, Seeker, Student, Prodigy, Friend - shall I go on? Only I've got steering to do."

"But why does everyone know who I am?" replied Harry, remembering now how Amy had believed he was joking when he introduced himself. "Other than the Wizarding World, of course, because Amy's a Muggle and even _she_ seemed to know."

The Doctor looked up from the work he'd been absorbed in and smiled mysteriously. "Oh yes, Harry. Yes, I do wish I could tell you everything, of the masses of adoring children who are probably at this very moment opening Christmas presents down on Earth, hoping and praying that it will be one book or film or doll from the special and magical _Harry Potter_ universe...but I'm afraid I can't."

Still smiling at the astonished and frankly disbelieving look on the younger man's face, the Doctor turned back to his screen. "You can sleep the night in the, ah, blue room."

"The blue room? But Hermione—"

"The other blue room."

"...Right."


	4. Chapter 3

When Hermione awoke (in what must have been the equivalent of morning, when the clock on the wall only said the star they were nearest to), she was able to sit up and move her arm again without much more than an uncomfortable stretching feeling in her side. A slight head-rush came with standing, but it faded quickly and she could then move to the door with a note stuck to it that read "clothes in here!"

What she had at first expected to be a closet was a room bigger than the Hogwarts library, with all manner of different colored and sized garments hanging from the ceiling and along all of the walls. She tentatively navigated the racks of clothes until finding something that suited her much more than the beige coat she'd seen, with the celery stalk attached to the lapel. How did that thing keep fresh in here?

Once dressed and cleaned up, upon returning to the room she had slept in, Hermione found another note taped to her pillow this time. "Console room," it read. Assuming that was the same room they had accidentally Apparated to the night before, she followed the same path Amy had taken her through, watching the landmarks in the corridors until she could clearly hear the humming of the engine. The heavy-looking metal door swung open easily, and Hermione gasped at the sight of the TARDIS' front door, wide open, with all of space looking in at her.

From one of the two lounge chairs set up in the immediate entryway, the Doctor's hand rose in greeting. "The view is much better from here, Hermione. Come."

Harry had been wandering the TARDIS' corridors for nearly 20 minutes when a door opened down the way and Amy's head poked out, dripping wet. "Harry!" she cried, sounding much less grumpy than the day before. "You ever see a swimming pool in a library before?"

He blinked slowly. "Um, no?"

Amy grinned. "Would you like to?"

Before he could even nod she had grasped his shirt in her well-manicured hands, dragging him so forcefully into the room that he staggered and landed only inches away from the edge of an enormous circular swimming pool, truly in the midst of a great library. "W-why?" he asked, otherwise speechless.

The Scot shrugged impishly, replying "Why not?" before diving into the water and splashing him with cool chemical-free water.

"The Doctor told me who you are, and that you're not mad like I thought," she continued as she floated along on her back. "I didn't know you were real."

"Didn't know you were either," joked Harry, trying not to look at the cut of Amy's purple bikini while she paddled about innocently. She chuckled and pulled a book from one of the many shelves. "Don't you worry about getting the books wet?"

Amy shook her head and completely submerged the text in the water before handing it over to Harry in perfect condition. "The paper's not made of wood where this comes from. It's a sub-ionic…spacey-wacey sort of thingy, I dunno, the Doctor talks so fast sometimes…"

They both laughed as he examined the book's flawless page, beads of water merely rolling off its surface. He could feel Amy's eyes boring into him, but he didn't want to know why she was staring so intensely at him now that she knew who he was and, apparently, even more about him than he knew. "How does it all work?" he asked hesitantly while still staring at the words on the page before him. "You know everything about me, even things I don't know."

She grinned toothily. Harry liked her much better when she was in a good mood. "The Doctor's a time traveler, of course. He's already read all the books and seen all the films—"

"—films?—"

"—even though only one book has been released so far in your timeline."

"Our timelines aren't the same?"

"_I_ turned 17 in the year 2006." She grinned as she watched him sputter for a moment, pulling the book back into her own hands to put it away. "So at least now you know the world's not gonna end."

Harry knew what Amy was trying to do, and he was grateful, but he also had a distinct feeling that he was breaking the rules. "Hermione says that it's wrong to know what happens before it's meant to. Meddling with time and all that."

Amy waded over to the edge of the pool and hopped out, dripping wet, to sit beside him on the tile floor. "Harry, I've read the books," she said softly, her face very close. "I know what you were thinking at the graveyard, with your parents. How you longed to be under the ground beside them. Harry…"

Face and neck very hot, he looked down into the rippling surface of the swimming pool, watching the reflections of the ancient and yet brand new tomes weave and fade. That had been only the night before in his timeline, though he wasn't sure if Amy knew that yet. "That was only for a moment," he murmured, but Amy grabbed the hair on the back of his neck and made him look into her clear, intense eyes.

"You can't think like that anymore, Harry," she sternly said. "If you think like that, like all hope is lost, you'll never win this war. And you _will_ win. The world is _fine_, Harry. Think on that, yeah? It's been over ten years since your war ended, and _we're all fine_."

He stared evenly back at her. "Even my friends and their families?"

The pressure in the back of his head disappeared. Amy was on her feet faster than he could blink, wrapping a towel around herself and padding out of the library. His stomach churned at the prospect of why she had refused to tell him anything, for surely if they all turned out alright wouldn't she have said so? He shook his head to clear it of cobwebs and looked up the clean tile walls, wondering what sort of man would build a library with a swimming pool, and what sort of woman would willingly travel with him.

They sat in awed silence, the Doctor and Hermione, as they watched the final moments of a dying sun creating the most beautiful hourglass nebula across the blackness of anti-matter. Golden rings of color shone across their faces and reflected in their eyes, not a shred of evidence showing inside of the TARDIS' main deck that they were in the void of space. He was calm as anything, but her hands were over her mouth as everything she had once believed in the rationality of the world vanished. He remembered all of those he had lost to the stars. Her heart and mind opened themselves to the possibility of another world just beyond her reach.

As suddenly as the light bloomed across the engine room of the TARDIS when the Doctor swung the door open, the colors, dust, and light all abruptly vanished. The death of an entire solar system.

And Hermione cried. Her head fell into one hand while the other hand clutched her day-old wound, and she struggled for breath between great heaving sobs.

"Hermione? Is it too much?" asked the Doctor with alarm, nearly jumping out of his seat to get a look at her.

She shook her head helplessly, trying to communicate with her hands as inelegantly fat tears rolled down her cheeks. "M-my m-mum," she choked out. "She…she _loved_ to look at the stars. When I was a girl, we used to spend hours looking up at the sky through her ch-cheap little telescope. I always hated it. I wanted to go inside and read about things that made sense. If I were to find her right now and show her what we just saw, she wouldn't even remember all of those hours, all those stars. It would mean nothing to her."

Scrubbing at her face, Hermione looked sheepishly up at the Doctor, expecting him to laugh, but instead found an expression of such unfathomable sadness that she nearly began to cry again. "Do you want me to land the TARDIS so you can catch your breath?" he asked in a hushed voice, utterly subdued compared to yesterday's vivacity. She shook her head rapidly from side to side.

"No. No, if I can't show this to my mum, then I'll see enough for the both of us," she insisted. "Can we see something else? Something _really_ gorgeous?"

A small half-tentative, half-concerned smile bloomed across the Doctor's impossibly young face. "Of course. Back in a tick." He jumped out of his chair and practically skipped over to the steering console. With another few flicks and twists the TARDIS landed. Hermione reached out herself and opened the doors, staring out at the strange, beautiful planet waiting for her.

The sky was burnt orange and with twin suns hanging lazily in the air. The mountains seemed to go on forever, surrounded by slopes of crusted dust. The longer she looked, the less beautiful and more frightening and sad it became; it was so oppressively silent. There were dead trees all around with the leaves lying in rusted heaps on the ground. "Doctor, where are we?"

The doors closed before her eyes, and the Doctor leaned his forehead against them for a moment before turning back to her. "Sorry," he gasped, turning back to the console with a frenzied look on his face, "one wrong turn in the Seven Systems and suddenly you end up on a dead planet."

"That was a dead planet?" asked Hermione interestedly. "It looked alive to me."

The Doctor shook his head quickly and flipped another switch. "It's definitely dead. Or at least everyone who used to live there are. Let's try something else…"

He took her next to Gatisat, a planet that was really a star. Its inhabitants – the Stelheels – didn't live on its surface, but in the atmosphere around it. They danced, like fairy-lights, in pairs and small family groups, the Doctor told her with the air of both a professor and excitable child. The couples stayed together always, connected by a strand of starlight since birth, flying together once they were old enough to leave their parents, and united until death. It was all simply a matter of timing; Stelheels connected at birth to the nearest unconnected fellow.

"What if a Stelheel loved one they weren't connected to?"

There was a shift beside her, the sigh of clothes rustling against the upholstery of the chair. "They can disconnect from their partners and reconnect with each other, but rarely do."

"Why?"

The Doctor fiddled with his bow tie and stared at his feet for a solid ten seconds (stretching out into what felt like years) before looking back up at the planet-star before them. "Stelheels can't survive more than a few minutes without the connection. They keep each other warm and safe. When one leaves their mate for another, their first mate will die. And, when you've been around someone – attached to them and maybe even loved them in your own way – all your life…you can't just leave them to die alone." He smiled sadly at Hermione before turning back to the dwarf star.

"It's sad, but also a bit beautiful, don't you think?" he asked, and Hermione nodded, clearly considering something very seriously. "Penny for your thoughts?"

Pulling her knees to her chest and wincing at the odd twinge in her side, Hermione shrugged plaintively. "Have you ever loved someone you weren't meant to? Even though you were, sort of, in some strange way, involved with someone else? But not really? And…and you don't want to hurt the person you're sort of with, because you _know_ that it will just kill them, but…you know that you'll all be happier in the long run?"

The hum of the engines, combined with the sudden stern look the Doctor was aiming her way, made her cringe in her chair.

"If you love somebody, you tell them," he said in a hard, almost cold, voice. "Don't wait for another day, don't hesitate, because the moment you do could be the moment you lose them forever."

For several moments, the only sound was that of the wheezing engines, until Hermione meekly said, "You lost someone, didn't you, Doctor?"

The Doctor's laugh was cracked and sad. "Hermione," he said with a pat to her hand, "I lose everyone, in the end."


	5. Chapter 4

"Amy?" Harry called out sheepishly, having spent the past 20 minutes searching the endless corridors for the Scot.

"In here."

She was sitting on the bed of a large, unoccupied bedroom. The coverlet on the bed was pink, but the walls were - shockingly enough - blue. When he came around the bed far enough to face her, she was smiling a bit bashfully.

"Sorry about that," she said, sounding embarrassed. "I just...you can't ask me things like that, Harry. You can't, because I can't tell you. Just you..._being_ here. It's wrong. It could change everything."

"Everything?"

Harry didn't realize he was frowning until he could practically see his eyebrows furrowing at the top of his vision. Amy nodded solemnly. "You and Hermione, you're - how did the Doctor say it? - temporally displaced. Two things, two people, who were only meant to exist in our imaginations, living and breathing right in front of us. It could make more cracks."

"Cracks?"

"Cracks in the fabric of the universe," shrugged the redhead as though reciting the contents of a grocery list. "Two pieces of time and space that never should have touched. And you're swashing 'em together."

He didn't know if he should apologize for that or not, and so said nothing. They sat in silence until Amy seemed ready to explode. She eyed him speculatively. "You're hiding from something, a whole big something," she concluded with a quirk of her inquisitive eyebrows.

Feeling like he'd been opened up and falsely examined for too long, Harry scowled. "Well you should know, you've read those books and seen those films all about me, haven't you?"

"That's not how it works,"argued Amy instantly. "You're temporally displaced; you and Hermione aren't operating according to the stories anymore. If you were, you'd be in a tent pining over Ginny right now, instead of here with me. Trust me, _this?_" she gestured around at the TARDIS, "was not in the books."

Harry was tired of this; the logistics of it was making his brain hurt. He found a chair tucked in neatly at the desk and sat down, swiveling round to face Amy. "Is this your room?"

She shook her head. "No, I dunno whose room this is. The TARDIS keeps all of the Doctor's companions rooms, though I can't imagine why. Not like they're coming back, is it?" She looked almost unbearably sad as she said it, staring at the purple shirt hanging over the back of Harry's chair. "So many empty bedrooms, just waiting..."

"He can't have had that many, er, companions," Harry speculated. "He looks so young."

That got him an inelegant snort. "He's 907 years old. Alien, doesn't age, just...changes, I guess. He's had a lot of companions. More than I even know."

Harry looked around the room again, wondering what kind of people it took to travel with that mad Doctor over hundreds of years. Just as he thought it, he felt an odd, ringing, sort of sighing silence in his own mind. A word formed between his lips before he made the conscious decision to speak.

"Rose."

Amy blinked. "Sorry?"

His head cleared, but the TARDIS seemed a little bit warmer, somehow. More comfortable. "Nothing," he shrugged. "Say, Amy, is the TARDIS...?"

"Alive?" smirked Amy. "She got in your head, didn't she? She must like you."

Alive...a living space ship. How novel. He reached out to touch the wall, and felt a happy sigh in his head. It was much nicer than having Voldemort in there. "I like her too," he replied quietly.

Amy's smirk settled into something more natural and much older. "I'm running from something too, you know," she announced gently, directing them back to their earlier topic. "Hiding things. I ran away the night before my wedding. Hopped into this mad blue box, ran away from my responsibilities, my boyfriend...everything. And I've been running ever since."

He had a feeling there was a lesson in this somewhere. "Are you gonna go back?"

"If I don't get killed saving the universe first," she shrugged casually. "Everyone's gotta face the music sometimes, Harry, even if it's frightening." It was odd, that Amy was treating going home to get married the same way Harry treated going to war. But he wasn't about to begrudge a woman who'd never had such horrible things to think about_._

Before he could form a response to what she said, there was a loud bang and suddenly the world was upside-down. They both let out a shout and grabbed the nearest anchored piece of furniture, Amy's surprise mingled with laughter. Apparently this was a frequent occurrence.

"Come on," she chuckled once the ship had steadied. "Let's see where the Doctor's taken us."

"Want to take a proper spin?" queried the Doctor once they'd had their fill of morose conversation. At her bewildered look he pointed over his shoulder at the TARDIS' gleaming console. "I'm sure she wouldn't mind if you had a go."

"You mean Amy?" asked Hermione, and the Doctor laughed.

"No, no, though come to think of it...no, of course I don't mean Amy! I mean the TARDIS. She's sentient, you know. I didn't grow her myself or anything, but the old girl's been here when all my other companions have gone."

Hesitantly, Hermione stood up and made for the console with the Doctor smiling encouragingly. "Your companions? You mean your friends?"

His smile went from encouraging to slightly sad, as though it had cracked down the middle. "Yes, it's rather easier to call them companions, isn't it? Like how human doctors don't call their patients 'the mother of two,' or 'the postman' or - the Postman would be a _brilliant_ name! I mean really, forget the Doctor, the Postman!"

Hermione grinned, feeling his cheerfulness was infectious in some strange way. "Because you 'deliver the goods'?" she joked. He pointed to a lever, and she pulled it. He pulled her around the console and nudged her towards buttons, knobs, dials, whirligigs, and even a few doodads.

"_Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night!_" he crowed, pulling a switch, and suddenly everything went topsy-turvy. She clung to the edge of the control deck to keep from falling all the way over (already dropped into a crouch), staring up at all the flashing lights and whirring pieces with probably the dopiest smile of all time on her face. For the first time in months she didn't flinch away from the loud noise or the blinding light, but instead embraced them like something clean and separate from the war and entirely brand new.

It was a magic all its own. It was _science_.

The Doctor was laughing uproariously, gazing almost lovingly up at the heart of the console before reaching up for what he shouted was called: "The Scatter Plotter!" With an enormous whirring hum, the TARDIS gave one last shudder and stilled. Hermione took a deep breath and stood up, leaning on the console as she rubbed at her stiff side. It was aching a bit, but otherwise it was as if Nagini had never bitten her.

"Whew!" The Doctor clapped his hands. "Well, that was fun, eh?"

"Is is always like that? The flying?" she asked, still gasping for breath. The alien grinned so widely she didn't need an answer.

It was trilling, every minute of it. He saw new people and new places every day, through all of time and space. He could meet...Shakespeare! Or Plato, Socrates, any of them! He could meet Arthur Conan Doyle! Oh, Merlin, the Doctor was probably plastered all over history, and she didn't even notice for a moment. All that reading, and...the whole time, he had been right there, hiding between the lines. Like an afterthought.

Someone who had always been there, through everything, steady as a rock.

She turned, almost expectedly, when the door opened to admit Amy and Harry. He grinned at her, clearly delighted, and for the first time in her life Hermione didn't think about what she was doing beforehand. She opened her mouth to speak at the exact same time as him.

"I love you."

"Let's stay here."

Harry, apparently, hadn't been thinking too clearly either.

They crashed halfway across the console room from one another, not kissing, just embracing, so overwhelmed with joy and relief that they could do nothing but wrap themselves tightly enough around each other to be mistaken for one interwoven being.

Over their heads, still perched halfway down the glass stairs, Amy shot the Doctor her best "I-want-something" smile. "Doctor?"

He quirked an eyebrow at her. "You want the nosy one, don't you?" he sighed. She grinned sweetly, and he groaned as though Christmas had been cancelled. "This is why I _don't do domestics!_" he shouted at the ceiling. "Mickey and Rose were bad enough, and then _Jack_ - the horror! - but now you want your _fiance_?"

She laced her fingers together and tucked them under her chin, grinning and begging with her eyes. Finally, the Doctor dropped his head back and flipped another switch on the console. "Hold on tight, everyone!" he announced before they were thrown back into the vortex.


End file.
